Monday, April 03, 2006

If you believe in you are lucky, you will get lucky

If you believe in you are lucky, you will get lucky, according to experimental psychologist Richard Wiseman, the author of the book The Luck Factor . Wiseman gave research subjects the "big five" personality scale, which measures "agreeableness," "conscientiousness," "extroversion," "neuroticism" and "openness." Although there were no differences between lucky and unlucky people on agreeableness and conscientiousness, Wiseman found significant differences for extroversion, neuroticism and openness.

1) Lucky people score significantly higher than unlucky people on extroversion. Wiseman explains: "Lucky people meeting a large number of people, being a 'social magnet' and keeping in contact with people." Lucky people, smile 2 times as often and engage in more eye contact than unlucky people do, which leads to more social encounters, which generates more opportunities.

2) The neuroticism dimension measures how anxious or relaxed someone is, and Wiseman found that the lucky ones were 0.5 times as anxious as the unlucky ones--that is, "because lucky people tend to be more relaxed than most, they are more likely to notice chance opportunities, even when they are not expecting them".

3) Lucky people also score significantly higher in openness than unlucky people do. "Lucky people are open to new experiences in their lives.... They don't tend to be bound by convention and they like the notion of unpredictability." such, lucky people travel more, encounter novel prospects and welcome unique opportunities.

Those luck factors don't apply to winning lottery though. Although lucky people were 2 times as confident as the unlucky ones that they would win the lottery, there was no difference in winnings found by Wiseman's research.

Heh? If one stands a higher chance of being lucky by having those big five personalities, then everyone else just needs to adopt those and be lucky... At that rate, there'd be no unlucky people in the world. *gasps*